And Bits of Fluff
by Teufel1987
Summary: What if clearing your mind isn't the only way to keep people out of your head?


**Well, this is a one shot and the result of a plot bunny that suddenly popped into my head ... I hope you find it funny.  
**

* * *

Harry Potter stumbled into the Gryffindor common room completely exhausted. It was his fifth Occlumency lesson with Snape and his mind had taken a major beating. The resulting headache was the worst he had felt in ages and that, considering his history with headaches, was saying something!

_Stupid, greasy git seems to enjoy torturing me, _he thought. He winced as his head gave a particularly nasty twinge, "_Clear your mind, clear your mind,"_ _that's all he can fucking say while he curses me again and again without any instructions on _how_ to do it! _He thought derisively before trailing off into a litany of curse words that effectively expressed his opinion of aforementioned the greasy git.

As he sunk down in front of the fire, he looked around for his best friends. Not finding them, he figured that they might have gone out patrolling.

_Good thing too, I don't think I could endure another lecture from Hermione, _Harry thought sighing in relief. He really loved his friend, he did, but the problem was that the bossy witch seemed to think that Harry wasn't doing enough in his lessons with Snape. As far as she was concerned, Snape was a teacher and thus a Professional. In Hermione's little world the term "professional" and the term "teacher" seemed to go hand in hand. Her outright dislike for Umbridge did not cut it as Umbridge wasn't considered a teacher technically. Even Harry's migraines seemed to elicit no sympathy from her, because according to her, all he had to do was follow Snape's instructions and everything would be all right.

_I'd love to see her clear _her_ freaking mind,_ thought Harry with venom. _I bet she'd die if she tried _that_! It's like asking a person to stop breathing as far as she is concerned._

Harry's head lolled back onto the backrest of the armchair he was sitting in, his thoughts tiredly wandering as he tried to deal with his throbbing head. He supposed that he should feel ashamed for the way he had thought of Hermione, but right now he was too tired to care much about it. At least he hadn't verbally expressed his opinions out loud.

What was truly annoying was that he wasn't feeling sleepy even though he was tired.

As he idly watched his fellow Gryffindors in the common room, his eyes came to rest on Fred and George. He noted that they had taken advantage of Hermione's absence to get in a spot of fun and were bullying some First Years, making the poor little mites sing the Hogwarts School Song. A part of Harry wanted to stop them, but he was too tired so he just sat there listening as their high pitched voices sang the words out. He idly wondered where in the song they were.

'... and bits of fluff ...'

At that one statement, an idea suddenly popped into Harry's tired mind making him forget everything around him and sit up in excitement. A few moments later he had finally calmed down enough to implement his ideas in his head. Not wasting any time, he quickly got to work. Hopefully, he would be able to keep Snape out of his mind the next Occlumency lesson.

* * *

'Oh Harry, there you are! You don't look as tired as the last time, so I assume it went well?' said Hermione as she looked up from her table to see Harry walking into the common room with a big smile on his face and a spring in his step.

At her question, the broad smile got even bigger, 'Oh yes, I was quite able to hold him off, much to his surprise.'

'You held Snape off in the sixth try? That's brilliant!' said Ron. 'I bet he wasn't too happy with that,' he continued.

'Oh you have no idea Ron. The man was positively fuming because I had managed to get it right. He nearly choked on his words when telling me that I seemed to have a hang on it,' said Harry with satisfaction.

'So you managed to clear your mind then?' asked Hermione with predictable swiftness. 'Oh Harry, I knew you could do it once you got over your dislike of the man and listened to his instructions.'

At this Harry turned to her and was noticeably cooler when he said, 'actually, he had no part in it. I used a method of my own. It was quite capable of keeping him out!' he said with satisfaction.

'A method of your own,' she said with a hint of scepticism and disbelief.

'Yup, a method of my own,' repeated Harry with smugness. 'And it was quite effective in keeping him away from my memories! Not to mention rather easy! I cannot believe that nobody had thought of this before.'

'What is this method?' Hermione asked with a gleam in her eye.

'That is my little secret,' said Harry suddenly irritated. He was not sure he wanted to tell his friend now. Not with the way she had first dismissed him and his idea off hand, preferring instead to go by the book. She had no creativity at all.

'Well, I think I'll head to bed, I'm knackered. Goodnight!'

Before Hermione could say anything or call him back, he bounded up the staircase and into his dorm. _Let her figure it out for herself, _he thought vindictively.

Little did Harry know that he would discover the side effects of his new and unique method of keeping his memories safe from intrusion the first thing the very next morning when he had his Potions class.

* * *

Severus Snape woke up the next day highly irritated. _Leave it to that brat to figure out how to block people from intrusion so quickly and with minimal instruction_, he thought. He had purposefully given the boy as little instruction as possible, doing the barest minimum to teach his old school rival's son the skill while demeaning, belittling and insulting the boy as much as possible, all the while tormenting him with the memories he had come across in the boy's head.

He wanted to beat the boy down ... to knock him off his high horse (to use that Muggle expression). And only after he had completely humiliated him, he planned on teaching the brat properly. To that end, he had set up a plan to give himself an excuse to throw the brat out after the brat saw that memory he had created to show his precious father in a bad light. He was sure that the brat would come back begging to be taught by Snape while cursing the very memory of James Potter. Oh, how he longed to see Potter beg in front of him...

Of course, he refused to teach the brat true Occlumency. Dumbledore only wanted Potter to learn how to keep the Dark Lord out of his head, and that was only as far as Snape was willing to go. If the Brat wanted more lesions, he would have to ask somebody else.

But his plans had gone awry when Harry Potter had done the inexplicable and found a way to keep him from gaining access to his memories. For the moment Snape had entered the brat's head, he was assaulted not with a quiet mind as he was used to seeing in all minds he had scanned over the years, but with a wall of sound that kept distracting him from perusing the memories. Every time he managed to get hold of a memory, the cacophony would increase till it dominated the mindscape he was in, eventually throwing him out. Repeated attempts only made the brat better at it.

A small part of Snape that actually was a decent teacher felt pride in his pupil's resourcefulness, but that pride was dampened when the bigger part of him realised _who_ his pupil was. Or more specifically whose _son _he was.

_We'll see how he fares in his next lesson when I up the stakes a bit higher, _thought Snape vindictively.

Since that morning, Snape had found his mind inexplicably distracted. What was more irritating was that he could not pinpoint the source of the distraction. All he could get was a slight buzzing. That was taken care of easily enough by thinking of Potion ingredients.

After breakfast, he went straight down to the dungeons to begin his first class of the day. Today he would be having the fifth year Gryffindors and Slytherins. Why was he cursed with those two houses being together in every single year? Even worse was the one he was about to teach as it had Draco Malfoy as well as Harry Potter in the same class.

He waited for the little snots (er students) to settle down as usual. A good use of knowing true Occlumency was that Snape could make instructions appear on the board instantaneously with just a flick of his wand. Other teachers had to spell the board or the chalk, but Snape could do it all in his mind.

As he concentrated on the recipe for the Potion of the day, his malevolent gaze fell upon Harry Potter. The first unusual thing about the class was that the boy looked rather cheerful today, no doubt smug about the fact that he had managed to keep Snape out of his head. Dismissing the boy for now (he would have ample time to take care of him later) he flicked his wand, feeling the tingle of magic that let him know that he had put up the recipe on the board as expected. Satisfied, he bent down upon his desk to go through some assignments he still had pending. He did not pay any attention to the buzzing that had slightly increased when he had looked upon Harry Potter.

A few minutes later, feeling that something was wrong, Snape looked up from his work to see something surprisingly unusual. Normally upon seeing what they were required to brew, there would be the usual scrambling as they got their cauldrons and fires ready while chopping, slicing and dicing the necessary ingredients as needed.

But today, Snape was astounded to see that all of them were actually staring at the board without moving a muscle, identical looks of shock on their faces.

'Why are you staring at the board like a bunch of gormless gargoyles?' he snapped. 'It's a simple Invigoration Draught you dunderheads! Get to work now!' he glowered at his students as he stood up, keeping his back to the board all this time.

Tentatively, Draco raised his hand. When motioned to speak, he said, 'er, where are the instructions sir?'

Losing his patience, at the inane question, Snape said derisively, while turning toward the board 'They are right there on-' he abruptly stopped midsentence as he finally looked upon what was written there on the board.

Instead of words describing the Potion, Snape noticed that the board was covered by a long string of the letters w, a, k and a repeated over and over again in that order without any spaces between them. That (unknown to Snape in his shock) had the Muggleborn students start silently giggling as their eyes lit up in realisation of what the words formed by those letters meant.

In the middle of this there was a song right in the centre of the board that (still unknown to Snape) had the majority of the class (Muggleborn and Pureblood alike) fighting to hold in their laughter. It was hard at first to decipher what it said, as the lines of the song were separated by chains of those letters, but Snape finally managed to get it;

_I love you,_

_You love me,_

_Homosexuality,_

_Everybody says that we're good friends,_

_But I know that we're lesbians._

As Snape stood there with his mouth for once actually hanging open in disbelief, his mind started to automatically fill in the tune of the song, also making sense of the string of letters on the way. It was then he realised that the buzzing in his head that was causing all that distraction in his mind was those two tunes going in his head simultaneously, repeating themselves _ad nauseam._

Dean Thomas sat there in shock feeling a bit of dread at the words of the song in the centre of the board. _Who had put that song up?_ He thought frantically. He hoped to hell that the greasy git didn't find out that he was the one who came up with that song, or he'd be so dead, that he'd be deceased in the afterlife as well.

Harry watched in amusement and fascination as Snape stood in front of the board with his jaw practically hitting the floor. He supposed that this was some record, him being the first and possibly the only person who could elicit that reaction from Snape. If he wasn't so shocked, he would actually be the first person to have broken under the pressure of trying not to laugh. He had no idea that his method of filling his head with useless ditties would actually affect the Potions Master in such a way.

From hearing that one line about heads filling with bits of fluff, Harry, in a rare moment of clarity and understanding had made some major logical leaps. A Legilimens needed to go through a person's thoughts and see his memories. But to do that, he'd need to go through the other memories to get to the important things making the victim relive the same memories. So what if there was a lot of junk floating around the victim's mind? What if he could concentrate on specific things? Things that he could recite in his head over and over again till there was little else he could think of?

And Harry had the perfect candidates for that purpose. In his short life there were quite a few songs he had heard that he had a hard time getting out of his head. The most recent being a really old song Dean Thomas had modified into a really dirty version of the original (which was just as catchy and annoying as the original).

As Harry started thinking of that annoying tune, another one had come up out of the blue. When he was five, Dudley had found _Pacman_ and had spent the whole day playing it on his computer with the volume set to maximum. Needless to say, Harry had the tune drilled into his mind ever since. However, instead of trying to forget it, Harry embraced the tune and integrated it with the mangled version of Dean's song. The _Pacman_ theme song was shortly followed by a slew of other annoying ditties and tunes creating a veritable maelstrom of noise in his head. Only this time, Harry decided to embrace the all noise to the point that he had gotten used to it. This helped him in shoving it all into his subconscious, ready to be brought to the forefront of his mind the minute somebody tried to break in.

Harry was jolted out of his thoughts just in time to witness the first person to break under the pressure. As Blaise Zabini snorted, it set off a chain reaction that shortly had the whole class laughing hysterically.

The laughter had the effect of bringing Snape back to the present. Regaining his composure, he roared for silence. As he rarely, if ever, raised his voice, the class understandably became deathly still.

Fuming, Snape vanished what was written on the board with a flick of his wand and an incantation. He addressed the class, 'when I find out who was it that had tampered with the board, that person will be very sorry indeed.' As he delivered his threat through gritted teeth making the class reflexively swallow, he looked directly at Harry.

However Harry wasn't too worried, he knew that Snape couldn't admit that he, Harry Potter had managed to mess with the great Potions Master's mind or else he risked giving vital information away. Alternatively, Snape also could not admit that Harry was advanced enough or clever enough to know the spells or be sneaky enough to tamper with the board.

With a supreme effort, Snape concentrated on the recipe and flicked his wand again. This time he was glad to notice that the recipe came on the board. However, looking closely he noticed much to his mortification a line or two of that infernal and crude song Draco had thought of regarding the Gryffindor Quidditch Keeper. His embarrassment was further enhanced when the students actually noticed that before he could erase the board again.

Furious and embarrassed beyond belief, Severus Snape took little time doing the one thing no teacher in recent history had ever done before; he cancelled the class for the day. Not that the significance of it mattered to him. He was too confused about the source of all this buzzing to really care. He needed time to recoup and locate that source.

* * *

The only person who was alert enough to notice her surroundings was Hermione Granger. And she had rightly (not that Harry would tell her) suspected that Harry had something to do with this. As a result, Harry spent the majority of the first half of the day dodging Hermione's incessant questioning, pressuring him to reveal to her his new method of Occlumency.

The witch was persistent; he had to give her that. But at the same time, he had stubbornness at his side, and could be quite mule-headed when he wanted to. After all, she had nothing on his relatives and the Ministry.

Finally she seemed to have given it up for now, though Harry had no hopes of her fully giving up for good. It was only a matter of time before she started again. He figured that she might try the sneaky approach, but he wasn't too worried. She might be smart, but stealth and secrecy really weren't Hermione's strong suits. He was sure that he would be able to spot anything she could come up with. He after all had years of experience in being sneaky. He might tell her sometime way into the future ... right now he was afraid that it may backfire on her spectacularly causing her to hate him forever. He hadn't heard of that method being done before and had no idea how it would affect somebody else should they try that method. There was a reason that Snape's method was popular. Also, he had seen how it had affected Snape and did not want something similar to happen to Hermione. He might be angry with her right now, but that didn't mean he wanted her to have a breakdown like Snape.

There was also that other part of him that still resented her for making fun of him. While his head knew that she did not mean it, his heart was another matter altogether. He supposed that he was being a tad bit immature, but right now he was too proud to admit it. _Besides, _he thought to himself indignantly, _she started it! All she had to do was ask nicely ... but noooo ..._ and he wasn't whining about it. He really wasn't!

Harry did enjoy her frustration though. That frustration actually grew as the week progressed. It was mainly in part due to the news that Snape had actually cancelled _all _of his classes for the week, something that had _never_ happened in the history of Hogwarts, causing the self-updating copies of _Hogwarts, a History_ to document the event. Apparently Snape had been forced to do so after an equally embarrassing fourth year Potions class the very next period in the same day. The exact details were unknown but one thing that was certain was that it involved the "Never Ending Song" in some fashion.

And to top it all were the rumours that stayed within the student body saying that Harry had something to do with it. These were given further credence when it was found out that his involvement was listed as a possible cause in the books. Harry was only glad that very few people read the book and that Umbridge wasn't one of them.

Equally popular was the other rumour that the Potions Master had finally become unhinged as his name had changed in the same books from "Severus Snape" to "Severely Snapped". Perhaps he shouldn't have been seen walking to the Headmaster's office, humming a tune to himself absently by a certain pair of ginger twins. This in turn had fuelled another rumour that Harry had somehow caused the Potions master to become unhinged.

Needless to say Harry had become rather popular among all the houses (except in Slytherin of course).

The upshot of the whole thing was that not only did Harry no longer have to go to Snape's office to learn Occlumency, but the visions had all but stopped. All in all, it was a great week for Harry.

* * *

Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore chuckled in his office as he popped a Sherbet Lemon into his mouth. While meeting with Severus to discuss the classes he was planning to cancel, he found something rather interesting without the younger man's knowledge. The distraction and the absent humming coupled with the frustration he was exhibiting reminded Albus of the few people who had tried to break into his mind. They had all fallen victim to Albus' unique brand of mental defence and had shown the very same signs that Severus was currently exhibiting.

It did not take a genius to figure out the source for Severus' current distress (even though Severus himself hadn't figured it out yet). Albus was rather proud that Harry had managed to come up with that method on his own. It took a special sort of mind to master that technique. While the side effects made one look like an abject fool, it did help in causing a person to be completely underestimated. It would be a powerful tool for Harry should he go for politics.

As for poor Severus; well it would take time, but he would eventually recover. Albus wondered if Tom had tried to invade Harry's mind recently ... the results would certainly be entertaining.

* * *

The wizard that once used to be known as Tom Marvolo Riddle sat back in his high backed and luxurious chair in Malfoy Manor. He was unsettled as of late his mind seemed to be filled with a buzzing. Further investigation had revealed that the buzzing was actually a highly annoying tune that he had caught himself humming out aloud on occasion without realising it.

This was not good.

He was a Dark Lord, and Dark Lords do _not_ hum! Furthermore, humming was what _Dumbledore_ does. And he is _not _Dumbledore and shares no similarity with that old twat. A fact that dear Bella had taken great pleasure in making clear to the foolish minion who had dared suggest it while at the same time teaching him not to suggest anything like that about their Lord and Master. _Ah dear Bella ... she's so dedicated,_ he thought to himself. She had spent a whole night in that lesson. The last Voldemort had heard of the man, he was still alive. Though he would violently twitch and shudder whenever somebody mentioned fluffy white bunnies and go into epileptic fits whenever he saw the colour pink.

In fact (as he had taken the pains to tell his other minions through liberal dosage of Cruciatus Curses) he did not share _any_ characteristics whatsoever with _any _other person. He was Lord Voldemort, he was unique and he was not _common._

Thus in an effort to quell this, _abnormality _he sank into his mindscape using an ancient Buddhist technique aided by the fumes of a rare herb he found in the Himalayas to figure out the source. He found that a dense fog had infected his memories. He was experienced enough to know that it was a representation of the songs he had picked up and so did not bother examining them. Instead he traced the fog to its source. Right at the back of his mind ... the place where his connection with Potter existed ... originating from a memory where he had tested his connection to Potter two nights ago...

* * *

Severus Snape sat in his personal quarters deep in meditation. He hadn't been able to pinpoint the source of the irritating tunes now dancing in his head and that greatly worried him. It had screwed his concentration up so much that he was unable to effectively teach for the remainder of the week. In fact he had secluded himself in his quarters once he caught himself actually _humming _a tune out loud.

What was more annoying was that he could no longer access his mindscape any longer. He doubted Dumbledore would be of much help since the man did hum tunes under his breath almost all the time. Thus he was on his own, and fairing rather badly.

However that was about to change as he finally managed to cut through all that distraction.

Entering his mindscape, he scanned his memories. What he saw truly shocked him. A thin sheet of fog had descended upon his normally clear memories. Upon closer examination, the fog was found to consist of all the songs he had inexplicably picked up recently. With a mighty effort, he managed to pull out of the fog (it had nearly caused him to lose his connection to his mind) and started to trace it to its origins in his mind where the fog was at its thickest ... right to the memory of his last Occlumency lesson with Potter...

* * *

Severus Snape's eyes flew open almost at the same time as Voldemort's as they both found the source of their current situation. Unknowingly they shared a further similarity as they both screamed out the only word that was currently occupying their minds at the exact same time;

'POTTER!'

* * *

Miles away from Malfoy Manor and eight floors above the dungeons in a cosy room in a circular tower, Harry Potter shivered. He got the feeling that somebody, or possibly more than one person, was thinking about him. Quickly shaking his head, he took one glance at the Marauder's Map next to him before redoubling his efforts into the finishing touches of his Transfiguration assignment, quietly humming to himself. Ron was coming soon and he was hoping he could have a few rounds of chess with his best mate. Who knows, with the way things were going for him, he may become lucky and beat him!

* * *

**So what do you think? Review!**


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